Why is this such a popular discussion? Is there some sort of stigma attached to a male roleplaying a female character that I'm unaware of?
Because deep down, players really really wish the female character they see is actually female, and the male characters are actually male. They feel there must be something wrong, might even feel downright betrayed, if the person behind the character actually isn't the same gender as the player.
Sure, everyone says it's okay to play opposite gender. They just feel bad that they can't figure out which gender the player really is, even when that doesn't matter at all. It's probably one of those subconscious fears that are hard to drive out.
It's not really the case of approving of the thing. It's about uncertainty.
Well, that's just my theory. I've noted people act much more rationally if I state plainly in the character descs that I'm actually a guy. =)
And don't forget the almost-but-not-quite transsexuals. I don't, shall we say, feel strongly enough about this to get myself operated, but if there was a widget to turn me to a woman for a day at time, I'd be first in the line. RPGs, however, are good enough a simulation. =)
I also play female characters because it helps me see the world from a different viewpoint. I write stuff. I want the fiction to have interesting characters. It helps not just to see how the world seems to treat females but experience it first-hand.
Also, I don't really know about the fantasy races - people rarely engage in roleplaying online so deeply that they'd actually treat, say, humans and elves fundamentally differently. Try playing a female character, and you see the difference right away, even in RP-light places.
What if, for a more extreme example, I write my own bulletin board application from scratch, but use PHPBB's code for handling BBCode ([b]foo[/b] style notation)? I am technically violating the license.
And you're violating the rights of the guys who invented the words you're using to tell that to us, if you really take that logic far enough.
Copyright (and thus GPL) protects the implementation, not the idea. You're writing an implementation from scratch. bbcode isn't patented and won't ever be, and you're not doing anything wrong unless you're copying actual code from phpBB.
But since you are splitting hairs here, let me remind you that this is exactly how GPL works right now: If you use any actual GPLed code in your application, that's a derivative work. If you use GPLed software as a starting point, and add your own stuff, then distribute it, it's GPLed. You can only relicence something you've written entirely on your own; when and if you succeed in completely rewriting the original application, then you're free to use other licences.
But also remember that this always only applies to stuff the software authors think is significant. If they say "okay, this bulletin board of ours is click-here-to-download-source, but that doesn't include any of the plugins you write", that's entirely different. If, however, they stipulate that plugin/addon code must be under the same licence, then that's probably overbroad and debatable. They shouldn't be denied the right to get your modifications to the application itself though; they were the ones who originally wrote it.
Yep, I was guesstimating this as "people actually play Monopoly by rules?" The way we played it, everyone just bought stuff until everything was bought, after which game continued until every street was bought, after which you could buy just about anything you damn well please at any player's turn, no one knows whose turn it really is, and the game ends when everyone's bored again.
Until then, as long as there's a need to embed documents, to use a powerful macro language that communicates with the OS and other software, to have data update in real time, to interop with business logic that depends on DDE or XLLs, or to do any of the million other essential things that Excel (in particular) does and OO does not, it's "Hello, Clippy!"
That's the Microsoft approach.
The OSS approach is not to try to integrate the stuff in the application. Integrating stuff to applications is slow, difficult and error-prone.
The smart solution, of course, being that the documents can be processed by external tools written in any language you choose, with the documents only acting as the intermediate data stores and representation.
Why make software open up the office application and use cursor-ballet to do its stuff, when you can just open the document and feed the data in right away, spitting out a new, modified document? That's not the confusing, explosive rocket science Microsoft is proposing - instead, just same stuff people have been doing since dawn of time in frigging IBM mainframes.
The reason nobody does that in MS is that nobody understands the file formats really all that well, but OpenDocument file format is actually documented...
Not sure if Opera uses the same settings thingy as Metroid Prime Hunters does for Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, but if it does, that thing only seems to have MAC/NWiFiC ID transfer to another DS system, and no hand-tuning of the MAC. (Probably just to make cheating and identity spoofing a bit trickier...)
Like others said, it's probably infinitely easier to just route the access through a laptop. =/
And, of course, remember to raise a question why your city doesn't have an open WLAN yet. Mine does. =) (Too bad it won't extend to my apartment yet...)
Gee, and here I was hoping that the homebrew developers would be forced to think a bit like the commercial game developers: "How do I fit all this stuff in such limited memory? If Metroid Prime Hunters runs nicely as hell, why can't I get Quake to run?" (The answer to latter: Yes, Quake seems to run, just scale down the textures a bit, no one's going to notice you use smaller textures. And that's apparently what DSQuake porters are doing. =)
The reason I hold the people who do awesome homebrew games in very high regard, as opposed to mere freeware game developers (who do good stuff too, by the way), is that they have to deal with the limited hardware and PC folks can always throw more iron at the problem without optimising it too much.
But don't think of this as a flame - I'm sure the memory expansion will make homebrews extremely interesting. I just hope it's not used as a crutch when it's not strictly needed.
Re:What's wrong with the interface?
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Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
I had no trouble picking up Inkscape and using it.
I had no trouble picking up the GIMP and using it. And when I started, I most definitely wasn't a graphician.
So much for that point.
The way you use one tool tells you nothing about how to use another.
Yeah, like how using a crop tool is totally different from brush tool. And how clone tool works nothing at all like the measurement tool. It's so illogical, in that light, that pen, brush, ink and eraser work essentially the same way - especially when eraser erases rather than paints.
What was the point, again? Care to elaborate, and tell how some other programs solve these odd problems of unrelated tools doing essentially different things?
Shortcuts make no sense either alphabetically or in relation to other shortcuts to do similar tasks.
Which is why God invented dynamic shortcuts years ago. You can remap them to wherever you want. Honest. Try it one day.
Right clicking to bring up the file menu is also a waste. Why not let me right click on an object and get context sensitive options? GIMP on every platform now includes a basic file menu at the top, so why cling awkwardly to the lack of context-sensitivity?
Um... I guess you're just peeved that the image menu has a lot of stuff in it. Know what? I think it's good that I can open file menu from the image context menu. Why? I know exactly where all stuff is. It's in the image context menu. Guess where level dialog is? Uh, well, let me guess, image context menu. Guess how I can apply blur? Well, it might be in the image context menu. Want to quit when there's tons of images open? Might be in the context menu, damn it.
This takes advantage of the fact that most of the time, your mouse pointer is on an image window. Almost like the Window Maker context menu: No need to hunt for the magical "start" button to start programs or guess where to click for the desktop context menu. You right-clock on the desktop. You launch stuff.
Yet, GIMP UI gives context menus to stuff that absolutely needs context menus of their own, like layers and like.
Re:What's wrong with the interface?
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Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
I kid you not, it took me FIVE FREAKING HOURS to do this.
Nothing compared to my two-freaking-hours attempt at cropping an image in PhotoShop, but who am I to criticise anything, I'm not a "professional"...
Oh, and how about GIFs?
Yeah, what about it? Works out of box for me.
Though why use GIFs when pngcrush has been invented...
Re:Krita is not compatible with my scanner
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Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
According to Some Vague Rumors from a Disreputable Source*, KDE 4.0 libraries will be ported to Windows, since license of Qt 4.0 finally allows that. So one (distant) day, we'll see Krita on Windows.
* the source being Amarok developers, who pulled an April Fools "Windows Release" thing, which left a few people quite stung. Then again, GIMP developers did the same and their Windows port turned out all right. =/
Last I tried, no pressure support for tablets. I really hope they get this really really fundamental thing down.
It's dog slow compared to GIMP. I think they need to spend tons of time optimising this thing before it's really usable, but I guess it's not time yet.
There really needs to be a GIMP-like multi-window thing (probably as an option, because WinPhotoShop users will complain like hell if the single-window thing is removed altogether). The n+5 billion tool palettes are always on way when drawing stuff and MDI still sucks, sorry.
Exult was a good example of "procedural" "growth" of a game.
Ultima VII was a 2D RPG. Yet, all objects in the game world have height. One guy at Exult hacked up a version of Exult that runs Ultima VII in 3D mode - basically, mapping all 2D tiles around cubes as described by their dimensions and height data.
The results were quite interesting (buildings looked kind of good, creatures and many plants and natural formations not so good, so they are being replaced by 3D models).
But it is a good example and exercise in extracting more detail from the game than the original developers intended or envisioned.
Well, the practical stuff is basically this: Linux supports whatever you put in the file names, Nautilus supports both Latin-1 and UTF-8 file names. OS X insists on UTF-8 names, on file system level. MacOSX chokes if I unzip or scp or svn a file that has Latin-1 file names - either refuses to cooperate or truncates the names, as happens with Linux-burned CDs. Linux-burned Rock Ridge CDs work just fine in Mac (aside of the Latin-1 issue). Mac burns CDs using some weird (new?) variation of Rock Ridge that makes makes all files lower-case in Linux, and makes the files *appear* to have 512 bytes, in case I burn big.aiff files (big files, or a four-letter file name extension, take your pick, I'm not a filesystem expert), and requires quite a few funny mount options to make the file actually readable.
And Windows, which I don't use these days a whole lot but ocassionally still need to, seems to still have funny ideas about MYSTERIOUS spontaneous Capitalizations and other WEIRDD~1 stuff, though it's almost getting in control in new operating systems after getting introduced over a decade ago. Some oddnesses can still be seen every now and then.
The academia is sound, as in "there's a good process in place that stops most of the errors" - but I believe you meant "not infallible", which is clearly the case. Despite best of the processes, there's bound to be mistakes. Everywhere. We're humans, after all.
Yeah, there's always been cases when I have definitely known something more accurately than my teachers, and that's extended all the way from school to university. But luckily, most of time they know stuff much better than I do. =)
For example, I completely buy the argument that the extremely short tags used by OpenXML make an OpenXML document faster to parse than an ODF document with longer, more understandable tags.
I seriously doubt that. Processing a few more bytes on today's computers isn't exactly a problem - if it is, I seriously recommend purchasing a replacement for your MicroVAX.
The reason OpenXML is "faster" is that it is a memory dump format, in a way. It's not meant to be human-friendly. If it were human-friendly, it'd use mixed-mode markup and the exporters/importers would optimise for document legibility. As it is, it's not helping.
Also, If you ask a user whether they prefer their documents to open faster or making the job easier for developers, they will pick the faster opening.
I don't use Word daily, so please, explain to me this:
I'm now sitting in front of a PowerBook G4. I fire up NeoOffice and tell it to open an average-size document - say, about 22,100-word manuscript for a novella I wrote recently in Linux OpenOffice.org. 18 seconds between hitting "Recent files" and the time the text shows up. And this is a slightly doggy alpha 4 version of NeoOffice 2.0. If I open up the text in AbiWord 2.4.4, I need to wait whole six seconds between hitting Open and seeing the text.
I don't have Linux OpenOffice.org at hand, but I can't remember it needing much time at all to open or save the text. I can say that honestly. I can't remember. I worked on this text for several months. You would think that I'd pay attention to the save times, right? Well, truth to tell, it didn't exactly stick in mind...
Look, maybe it's just because some of my first word processing programs of "my own" were on Commodore 64, and needed quite a bit longer times than that for much shorter texts. Maybe it's just because I actually use the programs for writing instead of half-assed attempts at DTP (I have Scribus for DTP, thankyouverymuch, but these texts I lay out with LaTeX). But I just can't buy the argument that people get so completely worked up about those precious seconds of their life when they open and save the documents. If they did, they'd be using plain text, for crying out loud, you can't really make it much faster than that.
Keep in mind that they maanged to go for about 10 years (1997-2007) without changing their binary formats.
Really, now? And here I thought they just stopped documenting the file formats publicly after Word 97, mostly because they weren't quite sure even themselves what changes had been going on... =)
How many revisions of ODF will happen in a 10 year time frame? (prob. at least two as far as I can tell)
Probably less than that. As far as I can tell, ODF has been made extensible through namespaces. The only major change will probably be in applications which will start honouring them (at least by preserving them if they don't understand them - I believe the only major complaint about OO.o is that it dumps all stuff it doesn't understand, but I hear they'll be changing that). The only major changes in ODF are probably just to standardise these extensions after there's widespread support... but I wouldn't count on it even then, it may turn into a "a group of de-facto extensions" kind of situation.
How well MSWord reacts to namespaces, by the way? Can I embed, say, Dublin Core metadata, Creative Commons licencing metadata, or ICRA censorship metadata in OpenXML directly, and Word would preserve it even if it can't make sense of it on its own? Please tell me it does - I have trouble finding a document format that would support such rich metadata...
Every supporter of ODF sounds as if ODF is the most used format world-wide and the de facto standard. Every supporter sounds as if there is no alternative to ODF and that it is the holy grail. But they all forget the realities that exist today.
Well, that's because everyone wants to forget that reality
and demand people to move away from this depressing, and quite frankly, just wrong situation.
With Office 2007, Microsoft will offer a free method to upgrade all those documents to the OpenXML format. It's free, because the converter itself will be available as free download from Microsoft.
Oh, that's right - you're saying this is just a small step for users. You see, it's not a very big step for people who have to deal with the file format.
In Orwellian explanation, this could be just "replacing one lie with another", or in this case, "replacing a depressing, always broken, nearly indecipherable binary format with a depressingly badly designed proprietary XML format nobody likes".
Do you want to know why people are idealistic about ODF? The Microsoft formats aren't good not just on the political sense - they're also not very good on the technical sense. Assume you have normal XML skills (as in "edited a little bit of XHTML and worked on some other XML documents"). Try making sense of MS XML. I bet you find it puzzling as hell and mega-annoying to create by hand. (What good is an XML document if you can't create one by hand? If you can't honestly answer that rhetorical question "what indeed?", you probably miss the point.) Compare this to ODF, which is simple to get started with if you know anything at all of other XML formats.
ODF is designed by people who at least have half a clue about XML, while MS XML is just the same old "this is how MS Word stores stuff in memory" (ie, the binary stuff) translated directly to XML. ODF is designed to be a file format for representing documents. MS XML is designed to allow RAM contents to be dumped to the disk while the application isn't running - this time in a nominally textual format.
But hey, you're right, it doesn't matter to the user. Users use whatever the application vendor can persuade them to use... the developers don't like it though.
Also, you said, basically, "Don't worry, Microsoft will provide a converter." But can you also say "Don't worry, Microsoft will provide a converter again when they change the format in the next version of Word"...? I bet you can, that's what Microsoft does - change the format for the heck of it, provide converters to keep users happy. But no one asks the question "Gee, do we have a lot of converters here, or what?" or "Can't they just stick to one format so we wouldn't need these converters?"...
OpenFrag doesn't seem to be from the ugliest end (though it definitely isn't from the prettiest end, either, far from it).
If you want to see hilariously, sacrilegiously ugly stuff, check out the old FreeCraft Media Project (I don't know if it still works in Stratagus though). I really need to thank those people - I'm a big fan of Warcraft II, yet found the whole thing pretty amusing in so-bad-it's-so-good way, also because this thing is a perfect slap on the face of Vivendi and Blizzard for the whole bnetd deal =)
But there have been some very pretty and nice-sounding open source games... Battle for Wesnoth springs in mind.
Too bad there's that many competent graphicians working on these things. I mean, I suspect this is the flaw of the open source crowd: They can work on the code, create really cool 3D engines for example, but can't really do the artwork to go with it.
I could help with the game projects - too bad everyone values a good programmer but can't find a good use for a designer or a writer, both things which I think I could do better than programming...
No, it's more like a store manager stopping someone who owns a competing business leaving the store, accusing them of shoplifting with no proof of anything being stolen, and then giving them the catalog to sort it out simply to harass them and take up their time.
...all this while the manager entered during the "Come-Right-In-And-Grab-Whatever-You-Want-For-Free " 15 minutes special sale.
if you're a member of the State Church (which you are by birth, but you can withdraw),
<nitpick>...which you are by birth, if you've been baptised, and thus member of the church and thus furthermore listed in the Church's census registry... </nitpick>
As a rule, people born in Lutheran or Orthodox (even in name only) families get their kids baptised and thus to the church's books. Hardcore atheist families can always get their kids named in the boring red-tape way, and I think there's no law against church-goers doing that, aside of getting more than a few weird looks... =)
Besides, it's not like the kid is going to pay the taxes in question until they can actually get a job, anyway =)
Church income tax (Kirkollisvero) is only paid by members of Finnish Evangelic Lutheran Church and the Finnish Orthodox Church. It's just what it seems like: Part of the income tax (exactly how much depends on the city you live in) goes to the church. No other churches are currently entitled to this stuff, but other churches are, like all other organisations, free to collect membership fees as they see necessary.
It's an old, old, OLD taxation relic, and due to the size of these churches, the system makes sense for their operations.
Apparently, it's also possible to apply for exemption of the church income tax, partially or wholly.
Shouldn't there be an "... er... so I'm told" in there somehere?
No. =) Think of steganography.
Know how many simple steganography packages work? They just hide the data in the least significant bits of RGB data. Do you think you can see the difference between two red shades, (254,52,52) and (253,51,52)?
Slashdot Mirror
Because deep down, players really really wish the female character they see is actually female, and the male characters are actually male. They feel there must be something wrong, might even feel downright betrayed, if the person behind the character actually isn't the same gender as the player.
Sure, everyone says it's okay to play opposite gender. They just feel bad that they can't figure out which gender the player really is, even when that doesn't matter at all. It's probably one of those subconscious fears that are hard to drive out.
It's not really the case of approving of the thing. It's about uncertainty.
Well, that's just my theory. I've noted people act much more rationally if I state plainly in the character descs that I'm actually a guy. =)
And don't forget the almost-but-not-quite transsexuals. I don't, shall we say, feel strongly enough about this to get myself operated, but if there was a widget to turn me to a woman for a day at time, I'd be first in the line. RPGs, however, are good enough a simulation. =)
I also play female characters because it helps me see the world from a different viewpoint. I write stuff. I want the fiction to have interesting characters. It helps not just to see how the world seems to treat females but experience it first-hand.
Also, I don't really know about the fantasy races - people rarely engage in roleplaying online so deeply that they'd actually treat, say, humans and elves fundamentally differently. Try playing a female character, and you see the difference right away, even in RP-light places.
And you're violating the rights of the guys who invented the words you're using to tell that to us, if you really take that logic far enough.
Copyright (and thus GPL) protects the implementation, not the idea. You're writing an implementation from scratch. bbcode isn't patented and won't ever be, and you're not doing anything wrong unless you're copying actual code from phpBB.
But since you are splitting hairs here, let me remind you that this is exactly how GPL works right now: If you use any actual GPLed code in your application, that's a derivative work. If you use GPLed software as a starting point, and add your own stuff, then distribute it, it's GPLed. You can only relicence something you've written entirely on your own; when and if you succeed in completely rewriting the original application, then you're free to use other licences.
But also remember that this always only applies to stuff the software authors think is significant. If they say "okay, this bulletin board of ours is click-here-to-download-source, but that doesn't include any of the plugins you write", that's entirely different. If, however, they stipulate that plugin/addon code must be under the same licence, then that's probably overbroad and debatable. They shouldn't be denied the right to get your modifications to the application itself though; they were the ones who originally wrote it.
And here I am, speedy-deleting stuff every day! Thanks, I was kind of wondering why I was compelled to do that... =)
Yep, I was guesstimating this as "people actually play Monopoly by rules?" The way we played it, everyone just bought stuff until everything was bought, after which game continued until every street was bought, after which you could buy just about anything you damn well please at any player's turn, no one knows whose turn it really is, and the game ends when everyone's bored again.
Seconded about Carcassonne. That game rocks. =)
That's the Microsoft approach.
The OSS approach is not to try to integrate the stuff in the application. Integrating stuff to applications is slow, difficult and error-prone.
The smart solution, of course, being that the documents can be processed by external tools written in any language you choose, with the documents only acting as the intermediate data stores and representation.
Why make software open up the office application and use cursor-ballet to do its stuff, when you can just open the document and feed the data in right away, spitting out a new, modified document? That's not the confusing, explosive rocket science Microsoft is proposing - instead, just same stuff people have been doing since dawn of time in frigging IBM mainframes.
The reason nobody does that in MS is that nobody understands the file formats really all that well, but OpenDocument file format is actually documented...
Writer Beware's blog linked recently to "Opening paragraphs of recent PODs that yielded an abbreviated read".
...all this makes me wonder why there's no Emergency Editor Squad (operating under the Language Police). =)
I suppose that should work too. Darn, never thought of that sort of obvious solution =) DS should be able to show what MAC it has...
Not sure if Opera uses the same settings thingy as Metroid Prime Hunters does for Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, but if it does, that thing only seems to have MAC/NWiFiC ID transfer to another DS system, and no hand-tuning of the MAC. (Probably just to make cheating and identity spoofing a bit trickier...)
Like others said, it's probably infinitely easier to just route the access through a laptop. =/
And, of course, remember to raise a question why your city doesn't have an open WLAN yet. Mine does. =) (Too bad it won't extend to my apartment yet...)
Gee, and here I was hoping that the homebrew developers would be forced to think a bit like the commercial game developers: "How do I fit all this stuff in such limited memory? If Metroid Prime Hunters runs nicely as hell, why can't I get Quake to run?" (The answer to latter: Yes, Quake seems to run, just scale down the textures a bit, no one's going to notice you use smaller textures. And that's apparently what DSQuake porters are doing. =)
The reason I hold the people who do awesome homebrew games in very high regard, as opposed to mere freeware game developers (who do good stuff too, by the way), is that they have to deal with the limited hardware and PC folks can always throw more iron at the problem without optimising it too much.
But don't think of this as a flame - I'm sure the memory expansion will make homebrews extremely interesting. I just hope it's not used as a crutch when it's not strictly needed.
I had no trouble picking up the GIMP and using it. And when I started, I most definitely wasn't a graphician.
So much for that point.
Yeah, like how using a crop tool is totally different from brush tool. And how clone tool works nothing at all like the measurement tool. It's so illogical, in that light, that pen, brush, ink and eraser work essentially the same way - especially when eraser erases rather than paints.
What was the point, again? Care to elaborate, and tell how some other programs solve these odd problems of unrelated tools doing essentially different things?
Which is why God invented dynamic shortcuts years ago. You can remap them to wherever you want. Honest. Try it one day.
Um... I guess you're just peeved that the image menu has a lot of stuff in it. Know what? I think it's good that I can open file menu from the image context menu. Why? I know exactly where all stuff is. It's in the image context menu. Guess where level dialog is? Uh, well, let me guess, image context menu. Guess how I can apply blur? Well, it might be in the image context menu. Want to quit when there's tons of images open? Might be in the context menu, damn it.
This takes advantage of the fact that most of the time, your mouse pointer is on an image window. Almost like the Window Maker context menu: No need to hunt for the magical "start" button to start programs or guess where to click for the desktop context menu. You right-clock on the desktop. You launch stuff.
Yet, GIMP UI gives context menus to stuff that absolutely needs context menus of their own, like layers and like.
Nothing compared to my two-freaking-hours attempt at cropping an image in PhotoShop, but who am I to criticise anything, I'm not a "professional"...
Yeah, what about it? Works out of box for me.
Though why use GIFs when pngcrush has been invented...
According to Some Vague Rumors from a Disreputable Source*, KDE 4.0 libraries will be ported to Windows, since license of Qt 4.0 finally allows that. So one (distant) day, we'll see Krita on Windows.
* the source being Amarok developers, who pulled an April Fools "Windows Release" thing, which left a few people quite stung. Then again, GIMP developers did the same and their Windows port turned out all right. =/
I only have a few complaints so far about Krita:
Exult was a good example of "procedural" "growth" of a game.
Ultima VII was a 2D RPG. Yet, all objects in the game world have height. One guy at Exult hacked up a version of Exult that runs Ultima VII in 3D mode - basically, mapping all 2D tiles around cubes as described by their dimensions and height data.
The results were quite interesting (buildings looked kind of good, creatures and many plants and natural formations not so good, so they are being replaced by 3D models).
But it is a good example and exercise in extracting more detail from the game than the original developers intended or envisioned.
Well, the practical stuff is basically this: Linux supports whatever you put in the file names, Nautilus supports both Latin-1 and UTF-8 file names. OS X insists on UTF-8 names, on file system level. MacOSX chokes if I unzip or scp or svn a file that has Latin-1 file names - either refuses to cooperate or truncates the names, as happens with Linux-burned CDs. Linux-burned Rock Ridge CDs work just fine in Mac (aside of the Latin-1 issue). Mac burns CDs using some weird (new?) variation of Rock Ridge that makes makes all files lower-case in Linux, and makes the files *appear* to have 512 bytes, in case I burn big .aiff files (big files, or a four-letter file name extension, take your pick, I'm not a filesystem expert), and requires quite a few funny mount options to make the file actually readable.
And Windows, which I don't use these days a whole lot but ocassionally still need to, seems to still have funny ideas about MYSTERIOUS spontaneous Capitalizations and other WEIRDD~1 stuff, though it's almost getting in control in new operating systems after getting introduced over a decade ago. Some oddnesses can still be seen every now and then.
The academia is sound, as in "there's a good process in place that stops most of the errors" - but I believe you meant "not infallible", which is clearly the case. Despite best of the processes, there's bound to be mistakes. Everywhere. We're humans, after all.
Yeah, there's always been cases when I have definitely known something more accurately than my teachers, and that's extended all the way from school to university. But luckily, most of time they know stuff much better than I do. =)
I seriously doubt that. Processing a few more bytes on today's computers isn't exactly a problem - if it is, I seriously recommend purchasing a replacement for your MicroVAX.
The reason OpenXML is "faster" is that it is a memory dump format, in a way. It's not meant to be human-friendly. If it were human-friendly, it'd use mixed-mode markup and the exporters/importers would optimise for document legibility. As it is, it's not helping.
I don't use Word daily, so please, explain to me this:
I'm now sitting in front of a PowerBook G4. I fire up NeoOffice and tell it to open an average-size document - say, about 22,100-word manuscript for a novella I wrote recently in Linux OpenOffice.org. 18 seconds between hitting "Recent files" and the time the text shows up. And this is a slightly doggy alpha 4 version of NeoOffice 2.0. If I open up the text in AbiWord 2.4.4, I need to wait whole six seconds between hitting Open and seeing the text.
I don't have Linux OpenOffice.org at hand, but I can't remember it needing much time at all to open or save the text. I can say that honestly. I can't remember. I worked on this text for several months. You would think that I'd pay attention to the save times, right? Well, truth to tell, it didn't exactly stick in mind...
Look, maybe it's just because some of my first word processing programs of "my own" were on Commodore 64, and needed quite a bit longer times than that for much shorter texts. Maybe it's just because I actually use the programs for writing instead of half-assed attempts at DTP (I have Scribus for DTP, thankyouverymuch, but these texts I lay out with LaTeX). But I just can't buy the argument that people get so completely worked up about those precious seconds of their life when they open and save the documents. If they did, they'd be using plain text, for crying out loud, you can't really make it much faster than that.
Really, now? And here I thought they just stopped documenting the file formats publicly after Word 97, mostly because they weren't quite sure even themselves what changes had been going on... =)
Probably less than that. As far as I can tell, ODF has been made extensible through namespaces. The only major change will probably be in applications which will start honouring them (at least by preserving them if they don't understand them - I believe the only major complaint about OO.o is that it dumps all stuff it doesn't understand, but I hear they'll be changing that). The only major changes in ODF are probably just to standardise these extensions after there's widespread support... but I wouldn't count on it even then, it may turn into a "a group of de-facto extensions" kind of situation.
How well MSWord reacts to namespaces, by the way? Can I embed, say, Dublin Core metadata, Creative Commons licencing metadata, or ICRA censorship metadata in OpenXML directly, and Word would preserve it even if it can't make sense of it on its own? Please tell me it does - I have trouble finding a document format that would support such rich metadata...
...and when you get no results, you remember that Googlebot browses as an anonymous coward, and doesn't see the signatures. Oops... =)
Have fun "using" the Slashdot "search", then =)
Well, that's because everyone wants to forget that reality
and demand people to move away from this depressing, and quite frankly, just wrong situation.Oh, that's right - you're saying this is just a small step for users. You see, it's not a very big step for people who have to deal with the file format.
In Orwellian explanation, this could be just "replacing one lie with another", or in this case, "replacing a depressing, always broken, nearly indecipherable binary format with a depressingly badly designed proprietary XML format nobody likes".
Do you want to know why people are idealistic about ODF? The Microsoft formats aren't good not just on the political sense - they're also not very good on the technical sense. Assume you have normal XML skills (as in "edited a little bit of XHTML and worked on some other XML documents"). Try making sense of MS XML. I bet you find it puzzling as hell and mega-annoying to create by hand. (What good is an XML document if you can't create one by hand? If you can't honestly answer that rhetorical question "what indeed?", you probably miss the point.) Compare this to ODF, which is simple to get started with if you know anything at all of other XML formats.
ODF is designed by people who at least have half a clue about XML, while MS XML is just the same old "this is how MS Word stores stuff in memory" (ie, the binary stuff) translated directly to XML. ODF is designed to be a file format for representing documents. MS XML is designed to allow RAM contents to be dumped to the disk while the application isn't running - this time in a nominally textual format.
But hey, you're right, it doesn't matter to the user. Users use whatever the application vendor can persuade them to use... the developers don't like it though.
Also, you said, basically, "Don't worry, Microsoft will provide a converter." But can you also say "Don't worry, Microsoft will provide a converter again when they change the format in the next version of Word"...? I bet you can, that's what Microsoft does - change the format for the heck of it, provide converters to keep users happy. But no one asks the question "Gee, do we have a lot of converters here, or what?" or "Can't they just stick to one format so we wouldn't need these converters?"...
OpenFrag doesn't seem to be from the ugliest end (though it definitely isn't from the prettiest end, either, far from it).
If you want to see hilariously, sacrilegiously ugly stuff, check out the old FreeCraft Media Project (I don't know if it still works in Stratagus though). I really need to thank those people - I'm a big fan of Warcraft II, yet found the whole thing pretty amusing in so-bad-it's-so-good way, also because this thing is a perfect slap on the face of Vivendi and Blizzard for the whole bnetd deal =)
But there have been some very pretty and nice-sounding open source games... Battle for Wesnoth springs in mind.
Too bad there's that many competent graphicians working on these things. I mean, I suspect this is the flaw of the open source crowd: They can work on the code, create really cool 3D engines for example, but can't really do the artwork to go with it.
I could help with the game projects - too bad everyone values a good programmer but can't find a good use for a designer or a writer, both things which I think I could do better than programming...
...all this while the manager entered during the "Come-Right-In-And-Grab-Whatever-You-Want-For-Free " 15 minutes special sale.
<nitpick> ...which you are by birth, if you've been baptised, and thus member of the church and thus furthermore listed in the Church's census registry... </nitpick>
As a rule, people born in Lutheran or Orthodox (even in name only) families get their kids baptised and thus to the church's books. Hardcore atheist families can always get their kids named in the boring red-tape way, and I think there's no law against church-goers doing that, aside of getting more than a few weird looks... =)
Besides, it's not like the kid is going to pay the taxes in question until they can actually get a job, anyway =)
Church income tax (Kirkollisvero) is only paid by members of Finnish Evangelic Lutheran Church and the Finnish Orthodox Church. It's just what it seems like: Part of the income tax (exactly how much depends on the city you live in) goes to the church. No other churches are currently entitled to this stuff, but other churches are, like all other organisations, free to collect membership fees as they see necessary.
It's an old, old, OLD taxation relic, and due to the size of these churches, the system makes sense for their operations.
Apparently, it's also possible to apply for exemption of the church income tax, partially or wholly.
(Thanks to fi.wikipedia...)
No. =) Think of steganography.
Know how many simple steganography packages work? They just hide the data in the least significant bits of RGB data. Do you think you can see the difference between two red shades, (254,52,52) and (253,51,52)?